Intel made nice video tutorial how to use OpenOCD and our JTAGs with their SoCs! This explains the frequent purchases they do from many Intel locations all around the world of ARM-USB-TINY-H , ARM-USB-OCD-H and ARM-JTAG-20-10.

If you still didn’t heard CooCox IDE is complete FREE ARM Cortex development environment with editor, compiler, debugger. It’s made by few open source fans who work in Wuhan University in China in their spare time.

CooCox IDE does absolutely the same what other expensive commercial IDEs offer, so not wonder that it’s platform of choice for many big names in the semiconductor industry.

ARM-JTAG-COOCOX is an ARM debugger based on CoLinkEX design. It is meant to work out-of-the-box with the free CooCox IDE.

It can also be used with Keil MDK and IAR EW IDEs via external plugins, but the driver for IAR is still not perfect knowing from our own experience with ARM-JTAG-EW how cooperative IAR is for their drivers we suspect the CooCox team made the same we did – their driver is based on reverse engineering.

ARM-JTAG-COOCOX is fast and affordable and the ability to debug via both SWD (Serial Wire Debug) and JTAG interfaces are the key points.

Today at 17.00 o’clock our local Bulgarian time (GMT+3) we will post on Twitter our question.

You have one hour to reply to our tweet with the correct answer.

At 18.00 o’clock we will count the correct answers and ask random.org to generate random number in range then anнounce the winner and ship the board by airmail next Monday.

CooCox is highly integrated and free ARM Cortex-M0-3-4 development IDE with compiler, debugger and lot of code examples.

CooCox supports our OpenOCD ARM-JTAG-TINY-H, ARM-USB-OCD-H and ARM-JTAG-SWD ARM-JTAG-2010 adapters, so our customers could work with CooCox IDE with our current JTAGs.

What we missed in our product range though was the designed by CooCox team own JTAG adapter with build in support for SWD and fast programming.

This is why we built ARM-JTAG-COOCOX it’s open source hardware and software JTAG which is supported out of the box by CooCox IDE, so you can fast program and debug your code with CooCox IDE.

At EUR 24.95 ARM-JTAG-COOCOX is fast, reliable and completely open source product.

CooCox IDE generally gives you the same what commercial IDE vendors provide and sell for thousands of euro, but it’s completely free, so you should definitely give it a try when you make your next ARM project.

MSP430-JTAG-ISO-MK2 has power profiling functionality which can be used from MSPDebug. When a chip is running, the debugger continuously captures current consumption and MAB (program counter) samples, which can be read and analysed.

As of 4 Oct 2012, MSPDebug contains support for the following power profiling functionality:

Basic statistics (average current, run time, charge consumption).

Time-domain analysis, including exporting of raw samples to CSV format.

Disassembly annotations, which show power consumption on a per-instruction basis.

Hotspot/profile analysis to discover which functions are consuming the most power.

The driver for this device supports both raw USB and tty access, and can be used to perform firmware updates.

MSPDEBUG is open source tool, for debugging MSP430 microcontrollers. The project is hosted on Sourceforge

The next logical step is to create IDE with MSPGCC+Eclipse+MSPDEBUG plugin for one completely free development environment for MSP430 supporting all MSP430 devices and JTAGs on the market + Power Profiling feature if you use MSP430-JTAG-ISO-MK2. The IDE will support Linux and Windows and we hope to be able to demonstrate it at Electronica 2012 in November.

Time is fly so fast when you are on vacation 😉 It’s Friday again and time for our next Quiz ISSUE#4

Today the quiz prize is ARM-USB-TINY-H (USB HIGH Speed) OpenOCD JTAG debugger. With it you can program and debug almost any ARM device and with the recent development made by Sergey Vakulenko EJTAGPROXY http://code.google.com/p/ejtagproxy/ you can also program and debug MIPS cores like PIC32 but you have to make special cross-cable.

You can win this board if you answer correctly to our question today.

The conditions are still same: At 17.00 o’clock our local Bulgarian time (UTC/GMT+3) we will post question on Twitter, you have to reply to our Tweet with the correct answer.
At 18.00 o’clock we will count the correct answers and ask at random.org for random number in this range, then anounce the winner.

A13 documentation is very brief and so far we found inside ton of errors, to me it looks like somebody wrote this document in hurry with copy and paste from A10 (also brief) documentation.

This may be shock for somebody of Western world but seems pretty normal for Chinese SoC vendor as their model is to sell not chips but solutions i.e. their customers (the consumer electronics manufacturing companies) do not do any design work on their sites, Allwinner sell them processors, pre-routed PCBs, pre-build Android and Linux images with all features enabled, so they just manufacture and spend no resources to develop.

What I found very useful with the Android A13-SDK image which we got from Allwinner is that there you have kernel configuration text script where you can define every processor feature as port functions, CPU voltages, times, DDR3 organization, timing, etc etc you name it and when the board reboots the bootloader read this script and pre-configure your kernel on the fly, no need to re-compile kernels and you ork with the newest Kernel 3.x available. So in this situation Allwinner customers never need decent datasheet at all because all development is already done for them by Allwinner. This explains why they do not bother to spend time to release proper dcumentation too.

We actually did the very first A13 design which is made outside Allwinner, but this leave us to explore A13 features by ourself, which is not so bad by the way, we feel like the pioneers of the wild west.

Today Henrik Nordstrom (who got one of the very first prototypes) send me message that he successfully run OpenOCD with A13 and can debug with ARM-USB-TINY-H adapter I sent him with the A13-OLinuXino, so in the next revision of the board we will break out the JTAG signals on separate connector.